NOVEMBER 2, 1998:
I am married to a man who believes "old," "worn," and "busted" are
synonyms for "bargain." If you're young and poor, this is not a bad
attitude to have, especially if you possess a primal instinct for fixing
motors. Twelve years ago I was thrilled when my boyfriend/future husband
found a washing machine on the side of the road, hauled it home, and made
it run. I found this feat amazing, one more reason to marvel over the
Renaissance man I had fallen in love with, a person who not only recited
great poetry but also, even in abject poverty, summoned luxuries out of
thin air.

Over the years he has resurrected from the dead, more or less
successfully, a variety of broken mechanical devices including space
heaters, ceiling fans, toaster ovens, lawn mowers, and, most spectacularly,
a canister vacuum cleaner abandoned in pieces in the crawl space of an
empty house. For 11 years he has kept a 1972 Volkswagen microbus on the
road despite rusted-out floorboards and a cracked windshield--cracked,
admittedly, because of an invention of his that failed. Tired of driving
with the windows down in icy weather, he attempted to fashion a defrost
device from several lighted votive candles glued to the dashboard. Driving
down the road he looked like a cult leader.

I still find the man I married an absolute wonder, but these days I
prefer appliances that come with a warranty. I now realize that
patched-together machines actually spend a lot of time broken down, often
snapping in a spectacular display of sparks. My husband tends to
acknowledge the demise of an appliance only after it electrifies him and
he's forced to heave it, in a flaming arc, into the back yard where it lies
for a week in charred ruins before I can bribe the garbage collectors to
carry it away.

So last week when our 25-year-old dishwasher started coughing out gallon
after gallon of water onto the new linoleum floor, I lined up a few
arguments. As my husband lay under the kitchen sink surrounded by a variety
of tools our toddler was busily applying to every knob and handle in the
kitchen, I started in: "Sweetheart," I said, "I believe it's time to get a
new dishwasher."

"No--" CLUNK-- "way," he grunted, his crescent wrench echoing in the
bowels of the machine as water streamed out of the cabinet in rivulets.
"I've about got this--" CLINK, CLINK-- "licked."

I took a pair of pliers away from the toddler and added another towel to
the dike I was building across the doorway to the dining room. "Even if you
fix it now," I countered over the objections of our child, "eventually it's
just going to break again, and next time you might not be home when it
happens."

"Come here," he beckoned from the depths of the cabinet. "I want to show
you something."

I peered past our toddler, ready himself to respond to any invitation
issued from a place where flammable chemicals are stored. Considering the
granules of Comet and the camel-cricket bodies surrounding my husband's
head, I asked, "Show me what, exactly?"

"See this knob?--" DING, DING, he indicated something silver with his
wrench which I could not entirely see. "Turn it to the right, and you cut
off the water supply to the dishwasher." His body twisted in what I assumed
was a demonstration of this point. The water pouring past his hips did in
fact cease.

Okay, assuming he actually got the dishwasher fixed this time, I'd know
what to do when it broke the next time. Somewhere under that sink
was a knob I could turn to prevent an epic flood from spilling out of the
kitchen and buckling the floors throughout our house. At that moment,
however, the mechanical genius was having no luck with the repair job at
hand. Every time he turned the water under the sink back on, the water in
the dishwasher poured out the door.

I pulled our toddler off his father's knees where he was bouncing
energetically. "Look," I said, "I really think we should just go out and
buy a new dishwasher before you electrocute yourself."

Worn out and sopping wet, my husband crawled out from under the sink and
leaned back against the cabinets. Water swirled in eddies around him as our
delighted toddler waded back and forth across the flooded kitchen.

"All right," he admitted finally. "I'll get the paper. We might luck out
and find a good used machine this afternoon."

"No," I said. "We're going to buy a new dishwasher. A brand new
dishwasher. From a store."

For a moment he considered the ancient appliance now almost floating in
a sea of its own making. "Well, maybe," he conceded, "but let's look in the
paper first. If something hasn't turned up in a couple of weeks...."

"Honey," I said, "every single time we buy something used, it turns out
to be broken. Remember the dryer that threw wet clothes out onto the greasy
garage floor?"

"Now, that wasn't my fault. The guy selling it had a seizure the minute
I got there. He was flopping around on the ground right at my feet for five
minutes. I had to buy that dryer."

"And the television set with the red light exploding across the screen?
That guy didn't have a seizure."

"No, but he took the television back."

"Not true. He let you trade the television in on another
television that cost 40 bucks more and still had to be turned on twice
before it came on once."

"Electronics are different from motors," my husband argued, taking
another tack. "A dishwasher doesn't have much to go wrong with it. I can
fix a dishwasher if it breaks."

I looked at him. His clothes were wringing wet, his hair was plastered
to the back of his head, and his wrinkled fingers were blue. "Sweetheart,"
I said as gently as I could, "I'm starting to have my doubts about
that."

He looked at our joyfully splashing son, at the towel dike about to
burst.

"Okay, you win," he announced undaunted, heading into the laundry room
for a mop. "We'll start at the scratch-and-dent sale at Sears...."